School districts in Iowa

70% of the 969 populated ZIP Code areas in Iowa are served by more than one school district — 678 of them, which puts the state 11th among the fifty-two. It is organized into 325 unified districts, the largest being Des Moines Independent Community at 95,020 homes. Its most divided ZIP Code area, 52352, is split between 6 districts for elementary grades alone. The two districts that share the most ZIP Codes here are Southeast Valley Community and Manson Northwest Webster Community, in 5 of them. Counted by homes rather than by ZIP Code area, 74% of the state's housing sits in a ZIP Code that more than one district serves.

How often a ZIP Code here crosses a district line

The state sits well above the national rate: 70% of its ZIP Code areas cross a district line against 53% across the country. With 325 districts over 969 populated ZIP Code areas, every extra district is another line to cross.

ZIP Code areas with a district969
Served by more than one district678 (70%)
Grade school and high school differ0 (0%)
No high school district named0
Unified districts325
Elementary districts0
Secondary districts0
Homes in no district at all0

The largest districts in Iowa

Ranked by the homes inside their boundaries: Des Moines Independent Community leads at 95,020, then Cedar Rapids Community and Iowa City Community. Only districts with a page here are linked; 318 more exist in the state without one.

The most divided ZIP Code area in Iowa

ZIP Code area 52352 holds 783 homes and 6 districts take a real share of them for the early grades, but North Linn Community holds 82% on its own at that level. This is the shape that makes a single-name lookup look right: it names North Linn Community and describes most of the homes here, and silently not the rest.

Grade schoolNorth Linn Community School District82%644 of 783 homes

High schoolNorth Linn Community School District82%644 of 783 homes

Each percentage here is a share of the 783 homes counted in ZIP Code 52352, not the chance that any one address is in that district. Enrollment follows the street: two houses on opposite sides of the same road can be in different districts, and only the district office can say which.

Every track below is 35 cells long and stands for all 783 homes counted in ZIP Code 52352, so one cell is 22 homes, rounded to the nearest whole cell. Cells lit solid are the homes one district holds, and the unlit cells are the homes held by the other districts in the same list.

North Linn Community School District644 of 783 homes82%
Center Point-Urbana Community School District90 of 783 homes11%
Alburnett Community School District18 of 783 homes2.3%
Vinton-Shellsburg Community School District14 of 783 homes1.8%
Independence Community School District13 of 783 homes1.7%
East Buchanan Community School District4 of 783 homes0.5%

For grade school, an answer of one district name would be wrong for 139 of the 783 here.

How much of Iowa a single district name misses

Across the 969 ZIP Code areas in Iowa with homes in them, an answer of one district name misses 117,604 of the 1,413,144 homes they hold — 8.3% of the state. In 237 of those areas the single name is the whole truth; in the other 732 it is not.

In ZIP Code 52722 · Bettendorf, Iowa the largest district for grade school is Bettendorf Community, and naming it alone misses 8,194 of the 17,294 homes counted there. The rest are with Pleasant Valley Community.

In ZIP Code 52404 · Cedar Rapids, Iowa the largest district for grade school is Cedar Rapids Community, and naming it alone misses 7,527 of the 19,788 homes counted there. The rest are with College Community.

In ZIP Code 50266 · West Des Moines, Iowa the largest district for grade school is Waukee Community, and naming it alone misses 6,616 of the 17,636 homes counted there. The rest are with West Des Moines Community.

Where a ZIP Code here names more than one district

Of the 969 ZIP Code areas in Iowa that the federal file names a district for, 678 name more than one school district. These are the 12 with the most, starting at 6 districts in one postal area: Walker, Columbus Junction and Adel. Each row opens the full answer for that ZIP Code, with every district named for grade school and for high school and the share of the homes each one holds.

What to do next

Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: 678 of the 969 ZIP Code areas in Iowa with a district named for them are served by more than one school district, and the line between two of them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.

This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.

If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.

What this cannot tell you

The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.

A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.

A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.

Where these numbers come from

School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.

The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.

Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.